Read through the paper. It doesn't reveal anything really surprising, but it's a start. Conclusion was:<p>- Most people want to change their personality<p>- People with personalities that are considered "negative" by society (ex: introversion) wanted to become more extroverted<p>- People that wanted to change their personality, did change their personality slightly, and self reported daily behaviors that worked toward the goal (ex: “I smiled and laughed with others,” “I mixed well at a social function”)<p>- Personality at the start and the end were self reported, giving way to bias.
I'm a personality type coach and I help people implement the kinds of changes described in the paper. There are many different models that deal with this kind of change. But taking one step back, I think it should be made more clear up front that "having a desire to change one's personality traits" itself is a trait. There is no need to pressure (most) people to change, and many good people feel a strong pressure to change just by being on the internet. Some seem to have a natural desire to change. They are self-improvers by nature. Some are curious, more open in general. They try this or that and wonder how life would change if they were more of an introvert, or more conscientious. Others are pushed into change, brought to their knees, so to speak, by patterns of poor outcomes in their lives.<p>One of the often-unspoken realities here is that this growth and change will cause anxiety directly. It's observable in any living organism. (Now think about New Year's resolutions...they can be real anxiety spikers) If any really pleasing dopamine reward is to come of this process in humans, its full manifestation is often very time-delayed as the change process itself takes its course. So depending on the traits and their role in the trait-changer's own systems, models, and beliefs, it is helpful to identify pathways that can involve the trait-changer's strengths and yield some increased leverage. For example, "being open to _what_ is less stressful than being open to _that thing I can't typically stand being open to_?" There's this blended approach.<p>Beyond traits, I find that typologies and archetypes are very helpful in establishing a quick and dirty template for change. If you identify as a "type" that finds benefit from developing cleverness, even if you yourself aren't very clever _right now_, we may see some surprising success if we try some exercises to identify and harness a latent cleverness in service of your goals. If you are a natural idealist, an idealistic princess who befriends all the little forest creatures, that's actually a very helpful model to examine as well. The story has been shared across cultures for many centuries, and it's a matter of running down the list of type attributes and noting the deltas with regard to your current life. I call my own method Type / Trait Interleave and so far I've been happy with the outcomes for my clients.<p>With traits we quickly understand the contextual you and your contextually-variant patterns. With type we get at questions of your core self and begin to understand how your contextually-variant patterns could be sabotaging or benefiting some other system functioning in your life. Thanks op for the thought-provoking post, I didn't expect to see it here. :-)
The most interesting table in all of personality research: <a href="https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/aschwanden-datalab-facebook-personality2.png?w=575&quality=90&strip=info" rel="nofollow">https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/asch...</a><p>This is taken from correlations with facebook likes. There's a lot of interesting observations here. For instance, introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd culture" stuff. Openness seems to strongly correlate with left or right politics. Emotionally stable people seem to like sports and outdoor activities (adding to a weird theory that lack of sunlight and exercise causes depression.)
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ― Henry Ford<p>I think this is quite on the money. The problem is that many of us don't manage to think "you can".
For one thing, many hold kind of fatalistic beliefs and feel powerless. Others suffer from over-confidence. That's not really thinking "you can" but delusion. I could imagine that this is a nature & nurture thing and that nurture would be enough for most people if only they could find them-selves in an environment that's right for them. The problem is, however, that we still kinda suck at bringing the right people together.
In my own experience, you can teach yourself to be a bit more extrovert for instance, but the change is not permanent and you tend to slide back into your "defaults" very quickly when you stop actively caring about it (e.g. find yourself in a very stressful or low energy period). Very much like fitness, it requires the regular practice to keep it.
Just to clarify a common misconception introversion != shyness. It's a matrix of shy/not shy and extravert/introvert. Introverts prefer to spend more time solo, but certainly don't have to be shy. Not shy introverts tend to be the power players in society. And there is such a thing as a shy extravert. You all probably know one or can remember them from your earlier years. The wallflowers who go to every social gathering but don't really interact with others. As a not shy introvert, I can tell you that I enjoy and need the occasional social gathering, but too much time with others gets draining.
You can execute patches but they don’t run as fast or as reliably as your underlying personality. Over a long period of time, the patches can become habituated and a kind of hybrid personality results. The underlying code remains.
Tangential question - the study calls itself longitudinal and was conducted over 16 weeks. I was not familiar with the word so I googled longitudinal:<p>> A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over long periods of time, often many decades (i.e., uses longitudinal data).
An interesting angle on studying personality is through the lens of research on psychoactive substances. A study on magic mushrooms several years ago found that "just one strong dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms can alter a person's personality for more than a year and perhaps permanently." Previously, it was posited that: "personality rarely changes much after the age of 25 or 30..... This is one of the first studies to show that you actually can change adult personality.."<p>This raises the follow up question: what is changing? Is there a fundamentally different reaction to the same situation, or is there instead a different interpretation of the situation which is what is leading to a different reaction?<p>Cognitive behavioral therapy, the "most widely used evidence-based practice for improving mental health," provides evidence that the latter is absolutely a possible answer. "CBT is a psychotherapy that is based on the cognitive model: the way that individuals perceive a situation is more closely connected to their reaction than the situation itself."<p>Based on this, it seems very possible at least one way people can "choose" to change their personality (as defined by their reactions (feelings, thoughts, and actions) to situations) is to seek to find ways to change the way they percieve the world.<p>Sources:
<a href="https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personality-long-term.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.livescience.com/16287-mushrooms-alter-personalit...</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy</a>
<a href="https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-therapy/" rel="nofollow">https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/what-is-cognitive-the...</a>
This paper is dangerous. It lets an ignorant mind assume that personality is a choice in some way, so a person with unpopular (e.g. more personal) personality traits will need to change those to more popular and sociable ones. People refusing to do so will be considered selfish and will be punished/excluded from society. Welcome to Orwellia!
This is based on the "Big Five" personality traits that are fairly well established: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism or OCEAN.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits</a>
Was listening to a talk on the radio while driving home today by a couple of psychologists/college professors, Southwick and Charney, and it was specifically about resilience but has some applicability to this topic - and they had suggestions for judging your quality of life and how to improve it, and how to make you or your children more prepared for challenges in life. Found the website about it and they recorded it in 2013:
<a href="http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_s._charney/" rel="nofollow">http://www.harvard.com/event/steven_m._southwick_and_dennis_...</a><p>Found this publication from them from five years ago.
<a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79" rel="nofollow">http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6103/79</a>
I was curious on what personality traits are and found this: <a href="http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/original.png" rel="nofollow">http://nobaproject.com/images/shared/images/000/001/623/orig...</a><p>From that, it's obvious that some personality traits can be changed (e.g. being punctual and neat) but others will be very hard (e.g. curious, imaginative, self-disciplined, feeling inadequate).
Using Stranger Than Fiction as an example in this paper rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it also accounts for about a third of the conclusion.<p>I like that movie, but it doesn't really add anything to the paper and even if it does I feel like this is the equivalent of saying "In Harry Potter a boy finds out he's special and goes on a magical adventure. Can we all find out we are special?"<p>It's more rhetoric than academic.
"You can have more than you've got because you can become more than you are. On the other side of that coin: If you don't become more than you are, you'll always have what you've always got"
-Jim Rohn<p>I believe that anybody who has put in any effort into bettering themselves knows for a fact one can completely change his/her own self-perception, and in-turn, their personality.
On the part of actually changing those traits, one could attempt to use a very precise radiotherapy machine combined with FMRI to find and kill the parts of your brain that bother you.<p>I'm not really sure I'd want to try to literally hack my brain this way. I have a lot of traits I don't like (hey, I'm posting this here while I should be working... Look! Shiny!) I understand they are what makes me the person my family loves (although some may say it's an acquired taste)
You can, many religious evangelisers are born introverts and self-adjust to extraverts by talking to large numbers of people spontaneously (forced, at first).
This super-inspiring video from Simple Programmer (awesome self improvement aimed at programmers) is really relevant:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOym9N6SZR4</a><p>People can clearly change their personality, it's just so difficult that most people don't try or give up when they fail.
You probably can, but the key word here is "change". I believe you can somehow "change" personality. You can't however "add" new personality. Changing personality requires sacrifice, abandoning the old self and many things that you currently love. And that is truly hard. At least that's what i believe.
If anyone here is looking to change something in themselves, I recommend this book (or audiobook, in my case) "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" by Dr. Joe Dispenza.<p>Sometimes just by being conscious and watching yourself as an external spectator of your own thought can do wonders.
> Traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Stability, Openness<p>Obviously these traits can change. Although for extraversion it is questionable (extraversion is not a merit, it's more like a gender kind of a "trait"), development of agreeableness, conscientiousness, stability and openness is what defines a character maturity of adult/adolescent person.